


this is the story of the road (that goes to my house)

by agent_carter



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Domestic, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 00:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19819102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_carter/pseuds/agent_carter
Summary: Danny's never been good at staying put. He's never wanted to before.





	this is the story of the road (that goes to my house)

**Author's Note:**

> The OT3 that absolutely no one asked for, written a couple years ago and purely inspired by Timothy Olyphant's unfair handsomeness. 
> 
> Title comes from "July, July" by The Decemberists.

Danny likes being on the road.

He likes learning new highways and discovering cafes and hotels and rest stops, like being untethered. At 25 he's already got a formidable sales record, a smile you can sharpen a knife on and game so cold it could freeze the fucking pavement. 

>>

“Afternoon, boys," he drawls, strolling past Jim and Dwight with another stolen account in his pocket. 

Dwight lets out something like a war cry. Jim just watches.

>>

He doesn't care about the job, not really. There's not a lot to care about in office supplies and paper needs, but it's a job, and it's what he's good at. He's a natural public speaker and it shows, his sales pitches could have been screenplays, they’re predictable and charismatic and they  _ work _ . In another life he could have been an Oscar-winner but today he's just a salesman, more misanthropic than he cares to examine and well on his way to dying alone on a really nice yacht. 

Stone-eyed, but silver-tongued. 

It suits him.

>>

He knows how he looks, how he talks, how easy it is to close a sale with a wink tipped at the right person, and he fucks—a lot, often, sales execs on their mahogany desks, happy hour barflies and married office workers mid-mid life crisis. It's enough, it’s  _ easy,  _ sedan parked right out back, getaway-style, waiting. 

>>

He turns 30 and he's been through two promotions already, a third on the horizon when his boss asks if he wants to trade in his keys for a desk job. 

"Don't you get tired of it?" she asks, without heat, because he’s not yet, but he's getting there. 

>>

Utica is an ugly name for a beautiful city, Danny thinks when he drives through it. 

Dunder Mifflin has been overcharging Morton Construction for a year now and Osprey sent him to poach the account,  _ there's a 20% commission in it for you if you land it, _ his boss had promised, and well, Danny's been bored for  _ months _ . 

He pretends to read the newspaper while he waits for his appointment, folds it graciously when the receptionist tells him they're ready for him. He leaves an hour later with a spring in his step and the account under his belt. He passes Jim Halpert on the way out, too tall to be taken seriously and Danny's in too good a mood to be serious anyway.

"Halpert," he says cheerily. Jim stops, glares, as much as a man with his temperament can.

"Danny." Danny taps his chest with his folded newspaper, leans in just close enough that Jim looks uncomfortable, and oh, Danny  _ loves _ that look on him.

"Always a pleasure," he says, grinning with his shark teeth. 

>>

Then he meets Pam because of course he does, and she's long lost on someone else, that's clear, but he asks her out anyway because he's nice but he's never been  _ kind. _ He asks her out, hand in his pocket, smiling like he'll still be here for a second date. 

Maybe he will. 

>>

"Do you have a favorite city?" she asks, and the tiny lisp on the edge of her words is sickeningly adorable, heart-failing, and this is bad, bad,  _ bad. _

>>

Their second date only makes it worse, she tells bad jokes and twists her hair around her finger, tells him about her dream of being an artist like it's nothing, like she's ashamed of it, and something inside him burns. 

And, well, Jim Halpert's gone, but Danny’s a fucking goner. 

>>

So he skips town, it's what he does.

He falls back in love with the road and puts Scranton out of his mind. It's not hard, Scranton's barely a blot on its own map, full of third rate restaurants and the smell of coal dust over everything. He makes sale after sale and it doesn't make him feel any better, doesn't make him feel anything at all—everywhere he's ever been has been unremarkable, and that's the secret, that's the trick, that's his pitch:  _ let’s see if we'd be a good fit _ , he always starts, and after a while, he means it.

>>

The road is good but it's not home, nowhere's home, and at 25 it was exciting but at 35 it's just depressing. He hasn't thought about Scranton in months and even less when he stops in Pittsburgh, lets himself be picked over, taken home, held down.

He drives through Philly, through Allentown, and when he sees the exit for Scranton he means to drive past it, he really does, his tires screeching for the few seconds it takes for his logic to completely abandon him. 

>>

Michael Scott offers him a job and he could have said no, could have said anything, could have made more of an effort to walk out the door when the door was right there to be walked out of. Michael's a lunatic, an imbecile, possibly a full-on psychopath, and Dunder Mifflin's nobody's dream, but, but— 

>>

"Hey, Pam." He says when he walks in, calm as still water. 

"Wow, hi Danny," she says, flustered, beautiful as the ring around her finger, and it hits him harder than he expected it to, four years later. 

Then Jim approaches, eyes a little hard, holds out a hand, and it's not a white flag, not even close, but Danny's breath still catches, because the matching ring is on his finger, and  _ oh _ .

Calm as still water. Not a lake but the Mariana goddamn Trench. 

>>

"You know, your wife and I went on a few dates," he says, half-laughing because it  _ is _ funny, and because Jim's always been easy to wind up, if you knew how.

"So why didn't you call her back?" Jim asks later.

_ Because if I called I would have stayed.  _

"She was obviously in love with you," he says instead, and it's not a lie but it's not the truth either, and maybe Danny's still bitter, just a little, that he could have had something like a life here once, maybe.

>>

He throws a Halloween party and invites Jim and Pam and the whole office. He hopes they'll come. He hopes they won't. It’s a personal rule not to drink at his own bar, but that night he makes an exception. 

>>

"Great party," Jim says. Danny looks up. He's four drinks heavy and he forgets to do his salesman voice, his camera smile. 

"Pam's great," he says, just starting to slur. 

"What's that?" Jim’s face is unreadable. 

"'S not why I didn't call," Danny repeats, and he's clenching the wood of the bar so he doesn't touch Jim, so he doesn't do anything appalling and stupid and selfish— 

"She's amazing," he says, the words slicked with liquor and spilling out of his mouth. "You're—" he shuts his mouth tight. 

"Shouldn't have left," is all he can manage, and then he leaves. Jim turns and opens his mouth when he walks past, like maybe for a second, he thought about stopping him. 

>>

Pam calls him. 

Danny has a horrible hangover, the kind that feels like it's breaking his jaw. His mouth is full of sand and his phone is buzzing somewhere under a couch cushion. He fishes it out and sees her name, declines the call.

He slowly climbs back into himself and showers, brushes his teeth, puts on coffee. After his second cup his phone buzzes again, this time a text. 

_ Dinner with me and Jim tonight? _ And then:  _ You do owe me a date. _

>>

Danny's really good at dinner parties. He always knows which wine to bring, which foods to comment on, which questions to ask. He’s also really good at lying, so his smile doesn’t falter when Jim kisses her on the cheek, and his hands don't shake when Pam puts her hand on his arm. 

>>

Pam and Jim sit opposite each other at the short ends of the table, Danny between them.  _ Isosceles _ , he thinks for no reason, vaguely trying to calculate the area between their folded arms. 

He makes conversation because sales is the other thing he does well, and it's easy, grotesquely easy, to act like a sales pitch is all this is.

>>

Something changes, but he doesn't notice it at first. 

He stays on the road but in a tighter radius, dropping by the office at least once a week. 

In a sick parody he doesn't know he's doing, Danny hovers around reception to talk to Pam, steals Dwight's chair to talk to Jim, stays around just long enough to see Michael revving up some hare-brained scheme and then gets the hell out, the Halperts hissing angrily at him when he wishes them luck and winks. 

>>

Three months have passed since Michael hired him and he doesn't know exactly how his life became this, them. 

Dinner becomes a weekly thing. He and Jim watch the Eagles on Sundays and he and Pam watch Cake Boss on Fridays. He's been their impromptu babysitter on more than one occasion, sometimes they call him for help with errands, or to pick CeCe up from daycare if they're stuck at work. It's the closest to domestic he's ever been, and it's haphazard, ridiculous, often tainted by a Michael fiasco or a Dwight catastrophe but he's happy, maybe happier than he's ever been— 

>>

They're in a bar when it happens. 

Pam's mother is visiting, so Jim and Danny go to watch the game at Poor Richard's. 

"Jim Halpert," Todd Packer booms from across the bar. He swaggers in close, too close, his beer-scented breath like a noxious cloud. "Still queer?" He laughs like it hasn't been his punchline for over a decade, slaps Jim on the back and grabs the back of his neck in a way that Danny  _ hates _ . "He's prettier than the last one," Packer says into Jim's ear, indicating Danny with a jerk of his thumb. “Hell, he's prettier than your  _ wife." _ Jim's arm is rising but Danny's faster, his knuckles connect with Packer's face before the leer's died off it, and then the bartender's shouting, and they run. 

>>

They're two streets down when Jim stops them. 

"Hey," he says. "You're bleeding." Danny looks down. His knuckles are, in fact, bleeding. 

"Oh," he says, looks back at Jim. "Yeah. Worth it." 

Something passes over Jim's face. It could have been the adrenaline, or the whiskey, or anything really. But Danny will remember that look for a long, long time. 

"Come on," Jim says, turning away and derailing Danny's train of thought. "Let's go home."

>>

Pam wants to plant an herb garden.

Danny doesn't know much about herbs, or gardens, or anything to do with roots really, but he's better at the Internet than her so that's how he helps: stretched out on a lawn chair, downloading gardening apps and reading advice from his tablet. 

“Ten inches  _ down _ or ten inches  _ apart _ ?" she asks, an unpotted basil plant dripping dirt over her jeans, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. He doesn't even know if Pennsylvania is the right climate for an herb garden, and he's honestly never heard the word  _ trowel _ before today, but he doesn't care, because she's all smudgy and disheveled, and happiness is suffusing through him like sunshine, like rain.

“Apart,” he says, and smiles.

>>

He loves them, Danny realizes. 

He tries not to think about it. 

So it’s all he thinks about. 

>>

One night in December, CeCe starts to cry. 

He and Danny had been watching the Giants absolutely slaughter the Eagles when they heard her. The fact that Danny had instinctively stood up too wasn’t lost on either of them.

She’s squirming in her crib so Jim lifts her into his arms, Danny leaning against the door. Watching Jim carefully cup the back of her head, hold her close to his chest, whisper softly in her ear — it's so perfect that Danny almost has to leave, because this life is never something he wanted, never something he'd imagined, until right now. 

"Everything okay?" Jim asks, his daughter's tiny hand clutching his shirt. 

He nods, because his tongue is just a piece of sandpaper in his mouth. 

"You wanna hold her?" Jim says, and Danny’s held her a hundred times before, but he knows, agonizingly, that's it's not something Jim offers to just anyone.

>>

Danny's never been good at staying put. He's never wanted to before. 

>>

It's an unusually quiet night. Helene had offered to take CeCe so the Halperts could have a night off, so he's teaching Pam how to make chicken marsala.

Jim's sitting on the counter and it makes him look younger, somehow. Or maybe just smaller. Danny sifts the mushrooms around the pan and Pam swats Jim's hands away when he tries to steal the spices, the spoons, her. 

"Let me do it," Pam giggles. They've almost emptied one bottle of wine and there's two more to go in the fridge. She takes the spoon from Danny and maneuvers them so she can be in front of the frying pan, moving him next to Jim. 

"Here, " Danny says, reaching out to help but she slaps his hand away. 

"I'm supposed to be learning!" she says. 

He just laughs and leans back, letting the herb-scented air wash over him. 

She stirs the simmering mushrooms, and the oven's heat had suffused through the whole kitchen, and it's then that Danny realizes when he'd leaned back, he'd leaned right against Jim, who was still sitting on the counter. His back is against Jim's broad shoulder, his hair just brushing Jim's jaw, stirred slightly by Jim's gentle breathing. Danny shuts his eyes, briefly, just holding the sensation in his mind. 

"I'm staying," he blurts. Pam looks at him, spoon still in her hand. Behind him, he feels Jim's body go tense. "Off the road. Michael said if I wanted a desk I could have one and I want—" 

Pam kisses him. Just drops the spoon and kisses him.

>>

Danny kisses her back because he's wanted to for so long, and he thinks about a dinner almost five years ago now, about the girl who wanted to do graphic design and ended all her stories with Jim's name.

>>

Jim.

He can't move, can't turn around, he's terrified of what he'll see on Jim's face. Danny's never met a man who loves his wife like Jim Halpert loves his, and Danny's taken a lot of things but this was never supposed to be one of them— 

Danny turns, Pam's fingers still loose in his, and Jim is staring at them with absolutely no expression on his face. 

_ "Jim," _ he says, and he hates how his voice sounds, the  _ need _ in it, he had never been like this before, never been a person who needed things, lived his life small, on the road,  _ more freedom or less, _ Michael had asked and Danny knows,  _ knows _ , that on the day he came back to Scranton, he should have just kept driving. 

Jim pushes off the counter, stands squarely in front of him. "You're staying?" 

Danny swallows, nods. Then Jim nods, takes Danny's face in his impossibly big hands, and kisses him too.

  
  
  



End file.
